


the keys to your kingdom

by thistle_verse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Aurors, Awkwardness, Blow Jobs, Denial, Denial of Feelings, Draco in Denial, Frottage, Harry's hair is a mess and Draco always notices ok, Hit-Wizards, M/M, Snarky Slytherins, a corpse or two, did I mention denial?, flirting at a crime scene, inapproriate jokes about corpses, some Italians, tea snobbery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-28
Updated: 2016-07-28
Packaged: 2018-07-25 22:31:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7549795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thistle_verse/pseuds/thistle_verse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was nothing so elegant as fucking, the first time they came together. It was teeth just a little too sharp— against a collarbone, on the right-side curve of a jaw, drawing blood from the plushest part of a bottom lip. It was the doorframe digging into the curve his spine was making of its own volition: closer, harder, <em>more</em>. Two hundred pain receptors per square inch in the human body and it was nothing but background noise in the explosion, the revelation, that was Harry Potter’s body against his.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the keys to your kingdom

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rillalicious](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillalicious/gifts).



> So many thanks to the delightful likeyouwannabeloved for the beta work on this story. It is so much better for her input.

Gray light breaking in striations of gold and the palest lavender over the Thames below. The winding stretch of concrete high rises on this side of the bank, the thick panel of glass forming one wall of his living room. London teeming outside, gleaming stainless steel and blank walls inside his flat. He breathes, the steam rising off his tea and up into his face; malty Assam, tinge of bergamot. He breathes, and imagines the hush coming in through his nose, of quiet circling in tendrils through his veins. The floor tiles are cool and smooth beneath the soles of his feet and so is he; swept bare each morning, made new with every press of dawn’s fingers. He is the thing which he builds fresh every day— layer of soft white cotton underneath, and then stiff white linen against the throat, unrelieved black of the wool uniform on top, darkness all the way from collar to polished boots. 

Straight lines and fresh pleats, and his daily monastic litany in his head: he is blank again, he is _clean_ , he is contained, he is—

 

///

 

“—too late!” Spittle flies from the man’s mouth as he shouts at them. From the corner of his eye, Draco tracks three dark red uniforms spreading out and down the street, between the crater in the cobblestones and the lunatic who made it and people running, headed _anywhere but here_. He knows that feeling—that sharp curl of instinct sitting low in the belly— so well he can still taste it now. Now, when his life has become the other reaction. _We’re the ones who run the wrong way_ , Potter likes to joke. 

Three red uniforms on one end, and Potter at the other. The man doesn’t even look at the others; it’s like Potter has some sort of lodestone inside him and every piece of crazy is drawn to it. 

“You Ministry lackeys, always too late! You think you can stop me? Do you know who I am?” 

“Sure, Rowle,” says Potter, and he sounds almost bored. He’s got his wand in hand, but his grip is loose, and he’s flicking the end lazily against the side of his leg. Which is a classic, overconfident _rookie_ mistake, except Potter is not that kind of man, and he’s definitely not a rookie. 

“My question,” continues Potter, and now he starts to examine the fingernails of his wand hand, as if there’s some dirt stuck under there, “is if you’re nearly done having your fit, or if we all have to keep standing around here. I’d hate to be late for dinner again.”

Rowle’s face is nearly purple now. As if all the ugly things inside him have been building and swelling with no release for so long that his very skin is about to burst from holding them in. 

“You jumped-up little cunt,” he seethes. “You filthy fucking—“ Rowle’s wand hand twitches, and his lips form the silent beginning of a spell, but Draco’s lips are faster. His mind is faster, his reflexes are faster. His wand was already poised. 

There is the briefest of seconds, the slightest tremble of an eyelash worth of time, when Rowle sees his curse coming, and his eyes widen. When Draco slices through his shield like a knife through the thinnest paper. A flicker of surprise. Draco has come to cherish that surprise, from dark wizards and colleagues and random strangers on the street. It feeds him, some days; he drinks deeply from the place he keeps it, the dark well inside him. 

Rowle’s body hits the pavement hard, almost silently. He’s gaunt, strangely weightless. Too many years on the run.

“Didn’t they tell you during your training that it’s dangerous to bait crazy Death Eaters?” he says as he and Potter meet over the body. 

Potter shrugs. “He was off today. Slipping.” Potter’s eyes are so green. Green like Slytherin silk ties and the curse he’d just sent sizzling through the afternoon air. Green like deep fields of grass and the color staining the edge of a sky right before a lightning storm. “Besides, I had a Hit Wizard with me, right?”

The other Aurors are drifting back toward them now, but Potter is still smiling at him over the corpse he just made, and he can see how the rest of this day will go like it’s a movie being projected on the back wall of the inside of his head. The debriefing, the witness statements, the wand checks, Minister Shacklebolt’s statement to the press out in the bullpen. Potter watching him all the while.

He knows exactly where they’ll end up when night drops its heavy curtain down on London. After Kingsley tells them all to go home and get some sleep. _Good work, gentlemen._

He knows, because no matter how often he tells himself it’s the last time, it never is. It’s a wicked little curl low in his belly, a sharp stab of heat that swirls up, and down, and everywhere his blood travels through his body, this thing Potter does to him. One of these days, he promises himself every time— every morning he wakes up in the wrong flat, the wrong blanket all rumpled and wadded down around his knees, the wrong walls around him filled up with Quidditch posters and framed photos of the wrong people— he’ll run the right way. Away from Potter, and Potter’s hands and mouth and cluttered flat, from the ridiculous heat of his body and the way he smiles just as his eyes are closing in sleep, every time. 

 

///

 

It was nothing so elegant as fucking, the first time they came together. It was teeth just a little too sharp— against a collarbone, on the right-side curve of a jaw, drawing blood from the plushest part of a bottom lip. It was the doorframe digging into the curve his spine was making of its own volition: closer, harder, _more_. Two hundred pain receptors per square inch in the human body and it was nothing but background noise in the explosion, the revelation, that was Harry Potter’s body against his. 

He remembers the high-pitched whine trapped in Potter’s throat as he twisted the front of his Auror robes in his fist and _pulled_. He hears it again every night when he turns off his lamp and closes his eyes. His mouth remembers, in spite of himself, how it felt pressed to the patch of skin revealed: the suprasternal notch, that small hollow pulsing wildly with Harry Potter’s breath. The sound he drew from Potter’s vocal chords with his tongue like a bruise, a smear of left-behind want.

“Lo here! Or, Lo there!” a Muggle was crying out on the street, on the other side of the wall Potter was pressing him against, the words fluttering through the cracked window like small, half-seen birds. “For behold, the kingdom of God is within you!”

Potter’s mouth had opened under his, slick and pink and fuckable, and it tasted like hunger. It tasted like a dare. Like flying too fast and too high, too late at night.

 _Behold, the kingdom_ , Draco’s mind had caught, repeated. _Behold the kingdom, the kingdom. The kingdom._ A record skipping, endless. Echoing.

 

///

 

Potter’s sheets are a strange rust color, as if an orange had been set on fire and the fire had been put out with dirt. They’re rough, too, cheap and fraying like Potter can’t afford to replace them, which is stupid. Potter could buy a closet full of silk sheets and not be skint. It’s just one of his weird quirks, more annoying than it logically should be. 

The sun’s not up yet, but the darkness is beginning to shift from deep ink to a purpled blue. The edges of the beat-up dresser in the corner are slowly turning distinct and in another half an hour he’ll be able to make out Potter’s parents twirling each other around that fountain in the photo framed on its surface. He’s spent the night again, in spite of himself. 

Potter rolls over, closer, and the sheets pull tight over him and then loosen again. An arm slides over Draco’s waist. 

“Should go back to sleep,” Potter mumbles into his shoulder. His breath is very warm, even through the cotton of the t-shirt he borrowed. “S’not time to be up yet.”

“Can’t.” 

When Potter’s alarm goes off, there will be a quick, shared shower, and then PG Tips in a mug pulled out from the back of the cabinet because Potter hasn’t done dishes since the previous weekend. Potter will be looking for a match to his last clean sock right up until they have to leave or be late to the Ministry. He could leave whenever he wants, of course, but Potter will just hurry through his chaos a little more quickly and run out with him, his red robes tucked under one arm while he pulls on a boot with the other hand. 

Potter’s hand has been creeping down to the elastic band of Draco’s shorts. He slides his fingers under it now and Draco’s skin sparks and shivers underneath them. 

“Guess we’ll have to do something else, then,” Potter whispers. He stretches his face up, and when his teeth close over the edge of Draco’s ear, he lets his breath out in a hot, uneven rush. Something about Potter’s touch always gets him worked up, and fast, like waking from a deep sleep too quickly, and just as disorienting. 

He lets his body rise up to meet Potter’s searching fingers and breathes out into the slowly brightening air, and everything is soft-edged and quiet. When Potter rolls over on top of him, one arm braced on the mattress at his side and his other hand wrapping around his cock—their cocks, pushing against each other and sliding, all skin against skin against the calluses on Potter’s palm— the familiar face above, filling up his sight, is like a drawing done in soft graphite. Shadows and bits of blue-lit cheekbones. A shape he could see even if the coming day wasn’t peering in at them with ever-widening bands of light. 

He would see it, he realizes, even if his eyes were closed. 

 

///

 

“We have to stop meeting like this, Malfoy.” Potter’s eyes are twinkling. He’s such a Gryffindor. 

“You love it, Potter.”

They look down at the corpse lying between them. One of the dead man’s legs is bent at an odd angle and an arm is half-falling into a gutter. The sleeve has pulled down enough to reveal the dark mark.

“That’s a Death Eater,” says Potter, idly. He pushes the bridge of his glasses further up his nose with the end of his wand. Draco hopes he singes off the front of his hair doing that someday.

“No, Potter, that’s a former Death Eater.”

“This Death Eater is no more,” Potter agrees. “Rather boring shuffle off the mortal coil, really.”

Draco smiles. He can’t help it. Potter is lit up on the inside, he can tell; Potter really does love it.

“Sorry to disappoint, Auror Potter. I’m sure I can make it up to you, if you’re lacking for excitement.”

“Can you really?”

“That’s Rookwood,” says a voice behind them. Granger’s got her hair pulled into an enormous bun on top of her head. She looks back and forth between them. “Augustus Rookwood.”

“He’s expired now,” says Potter.

“An ex-Rookwood,” adds Draco. “Rookwood has ceased to be. Kicked the bucket.”

“Snuffed it,” says Potter.

“It’s disgusting, you know,” Granger tells them. “The flirting you do over corpses. I’m going back to the Ministry to tell Kingsley we got Rookwood, before you actually start snogging.” She starts walking over to the Apparition point, then turns back. “Snogging at a crime scene is not allowed, by the way.”

Granger pops out of sight, and Potter looks back at him. “Wanna recreate our own crime scene later? You can play investigator. I’ll play the body.” 

“You are truly revolting, Potter.”

Potter smiles. “You love it, Malfoy.”

 

///

 

The first time he and Potter fucked, he was still engaged to Astoria, and Potter had only recently split from the girl Weasley. Potter had seemed to feel more guilt about it than he did; he and Astoria liked each other well enough, but their future marriage was pure business, really. It was nothing to him if she was having it off with someone else in the meantime, and he’d damn well claim the same leeway for himself. 

This was not something Potter could quite comprehend, apparently. There had been a stuttered apology, which was insulting, and then lots of subtle, searching looks when they crossed paths at the Ministry. It was both frustrating and ridiculously endearing at the same time.

Potter lasted a month. A month where Draco had told himself he was not checking the Prophet’s gossip column to find the random pap snaps of Potter meeting his ex for lunch. A month of the occasional brushing touch that turned the air electric between them. A month where he pulled his own marriage contract out of his father’s desk drawer and read it more closely than he’d ever done. 

And then nearly five weeks later, on a dead end stakeout he’d been called to back Potter up on, the tension broke like a storm cloud, in thunder and hot breath in each other’s ears. He would never forget, no matter how many times they’d fucked each other since, the look on Potter’s face when he dropped to his knees and took the tip of Potter’s cock between his lips; the way Potter’s bottom lip had fallen, like the pleasure was dragging it down, and how his eyelids had fluttered shut as Draco tasted the salty slit with his tongue, and then open again as he pushed his lips further up the shaft and sucked. The seconds went all slow and heavy between them. A strange, sympathetic magic. 

He had loved it: the warm weight of Potter’s cock pressing slickly in and out, the flex of muscle at Potter’s hips as he fought to keep himself from thrusting hard into Draco’s waiting mouth. The sounds falling out of Potter’s mouth— gods, the heavy breaths and the little curls of involuntary moaning notes dripping out of Potter as he ran his fingers into Draco’s hair, back and forth and over and over. His own mouth become pure hunger: to take Potter inside, to take him soft and then deeper, harder. The tips of Potter’s fingers just rubbing, so lightly, against his jawline, and the way Potter watched, so intently, as his cock slid in and out of Draco’s mouth. 

By the time Potter went utterly still, some indecipherable words on his lips and his head thrown back as if he was talking to Draco and the gods both, his own breath was coming so hard and hot that he hardly recognized himself. He hadn’t touched his own cock yet, but somehow Potter’s pleasure and being its sole source had pleasured _him_ to the point of panting excitement, too. He grabbed at Potter’s hips, then slid his hands back to his arse, holding and pulling him deeper, and Potter’s cock jumped and pulsed and spilled into Draco’s mouth, and it felt like winning. It felt like catching the snitch during a match, only they’d caught it together, playing for the same team. It felt like his chest was going to burst open, jagged and frantic like the beat of his heart, like the dark, wicked, _filthy_ things he wanted from Potter. 

Potter had slumped down onto the floor with him and, still panting and trembling, tugged at the buttons on Draco’s trousers until they gave way and he’d wrapped a hot hand around Draco’s painfully hard cock and he’d _pulled_ , base to tip and back again. It had only taken a minute or so before Draco had come, painfully out of control, all over Potter’s fingers and fist and with Potter’s teeth in the flesh of his throat. 

After, they sat against the wall, side by side. Potter’s trousers were back up around his hips, but he hadn’t buttoned them. He was staring up at the ceiling in the dark office they’d been in all night. Draco watch him for while, from the corner of his eye. 

“Regretting it already?” he said, finally. He didn’t turn his head toward him. 

Potter rubbed the back of his hand against his chin. The slight abrasions on Draco’s neck from that stubble flared at the sound, and with it, impossibly, his pulse.

Potter shook his head, once, nothing wasted. “No. Gods, no. Just, I think I might have made everything more painful, you know? With my timing.”

He sat, and breathed for another moment. “This was always going to hurt somehow, Potter. You and me.” Potter turned his head to look at him, so he turned, too, and their eyes met. “Wasn’t it already?”

Potter pressed his lips together, hard, but his eyes went soft, and he put his hand out to rest lightly on Draco’s bent knee. 

It was the first gentle touch they’d ever allowed themselves.

 

///

 

It worries him, sometimes. How easy he finds it now to kill a target. Once, killing had been insurmountably difficult, and it had been the only thing keeping him just this side of a line he hadn’t even fully understood. Now there’s nothing keeping him from crossing a line except his own judgement.

He only kills dark wizards, of course. He is a fully licensed Hit Wizard with a mandate from the Wizengamot, and he’s on the _right_ side now. 

Only, consider: he’d thought he was on the right side once before, and turned out to be very wrong. Maybe, when you’ve been wrong before, you can never feel entirely sure of anything.

Maybe you can never be entirely sure of yourself.

 

///

 

“I look like my dad, but I have my mother’s eyes,” Potter had said, the second time he’d stayed over. Draco looked up from where he’d been staring at the photo of Potter’s parents on his dresser. He hadn’t heard him come into the bedroom. “Anyone who ever knew them always tells me that.”

It was true enough. James Potter had the same messy black hair, the same square jaw and pointy chin. The same way of moving his arms, a hand rubbing sheepishly against the back of his head when he looked at the camera. He supposed Potter must like that, the apparent connection, however ephemeral. Potter, who never knew his parents at all.

“It’s not always a positive experience,” he said. “When you look so much like your father.”

He could feel Potter looking at him, and then an arm slipped around his waist. “I don’t think of your father when I look at you.”

Draco let out a snort. “Well, that’s a relief, Potter. It would be exceedingly awkward if you were thinking of my father when you fucked me.”

Potter pinched him, right over the ribs. “Shut up. You know what I mean, tosser.” Draco threw his arm off and grabbed him by the shoulders, but Potter pivoted, and pushed, and they ended up falling on top of Potter’s bed in a heap. When he looked up, all he could see was Potter’s face above him: the green of Potter’s eyes and the way his mouth was curved up in a lopsided smile. Potter’s chest rose and fell and pushed against his. 

“You just look like Draco to me. Like your own self.”

“Eloquent, Potter,” he’d said, but there had been a part of him, something hard and frozen since the war, that had cracked, and he’d lifted his head off the mattress and pressed his mouth to Potter’s. Warm lips, slick tongues, Potter’s stubble rubbing against his chin. 

“Now,” said Potter, when they broke apart. “About me fucking you—“

 

///

 

There is a bed in St. Mungo’s that stays empty. There is a chart that hangs on the end of it, and a name written on the top. 

The name is his name, and the bed is ready for Draco Malfoy on the day he isn’t quick enough. The day a bad man or woman beats him. And Draco is waiting for that day like the bed waits for him. There are waiting beds for every Hit Wizard, and they’re all watching for that particular bad man who will put them in the empty bed, or worse.

Draco is the only one who watches for the bad man inside himself, too. 

 

///

 

Potter laughs like he’s making up for lost time. Like there’s an expiration date on some kind of joy he couldn’t reach for a long, long time, and if he doesn’t use it now it will disappear forever. 

Potter smiles all crooked, his eyes crinkling in the corners and his teeth showing. His whole face smiles.

Potter kisses Draco like he needs the oxygen from Draco’s lungs. Like he can’t get enough of it, and all the bits of Draco swirling around in his breath.

Like Potter will float away, full of light, higher and higher into a pale blue sky, if Draco lets go.

 

///

 

Sometimes he looks at himself in the mirror, naked, after a shower or when he’s just taken off his black wool uniform. He looks at the faded pink lines across his chest and torso, so faint and thin and almost invisible, like spider webs. Potter will trace them with the pads of his fingers, some nights. His lips following gently, his face hidden in Draco’s skin like he can’t stand the guilt of having put them there. 

But Draco doesn’t think of them like that at all. He doesn’t blame Potter. He’s not sure he ever did. When Draco thinks about that day he thinks about the way the light beamed silver through the heavy panes of the bathroom windows, and the way the water on the floor made the sounds around him echo strangely— softer, like the edges of everything were being sanded down, smoothed by his own breath in his ears. He remembers how heavy his body felt, the way his mind seemed to wander, to float out of himself like a dog slipped its tether.

He imagines the view of himself from above: how his blood might have looked leaving his body in seeping streams, in slow rivers. He thinks about Potter kneeling there, in the water and in his blood, and how afterward, when Snape coaxed it back into his body, some of his blood had traces of Potter in it. Faint, flickering. 

Almost invisible, except in his imagination. 

 

///

 

Potter makes a very particular sound when Draco puts one— then two— slick fingers inside his arse. A high, breathy kind of sound, like he’s swallowed a word before it left his tongue. Draco has memorized all the sounds Potter makes when they do this together. 

“Another?” he whispers, and Potter moans, nodding into the pillow. 

A third finger slips in to join the others, and Draco curls and twists them, strokes in and out while Potter gasps out his non-words. Sweat is gathering on Draco’s forehead and his lungs are burning, his chest rising and falling unevenly. 

“You like that, Potter, don’t you? You like my fingers there.”

Potter’s back curls, his shoulders rising and his knees pulling up further underneath him. He rocks back onto Draco’s fingers. 

“You ready, Potter? You look ready. You look so—“

“God, Malfoy,” breathes Potter. “Just fuck me already.”

Draco lets his head fall and smiles against Potter’s lower back, then bites down, just slightly, before he pulls his fingers out. He rubs a hand, slick with lube, over his cock. He’s been hard for so long, the touch is almost painful in how good it feels. 

He crawls up over Potter’s body, and Potter’s skin, flushed and warm and damp, feels so good underneath him. Potter’s hunger— the way he pushes back into Draco, the clench of his fingers on the sheets beside their bodies— feels so good between them.

He rubs the head of his cock into the cleft of Potter’s arse, against the place his fingers have stroked and stretched, and he sucks in a breath and holds it. Pushing into Potter’s body is a feeling he never gets used to; every time he does it he is surprised all over again by the clench and the heat of Potter around his cock. How it knocks the air out of him. How good it feels to thrust into Potter’s body underneath him while Potter grabs for the headboard and gasps.

“You’re so good, Potter,” he whispers unsteadily, when he trusts his voice. “You look so good like this.”

“More,” says Potter, his voice all rough and dark. The voice he uses when Draco’s cock is inside him. When Draco gets on his knees in front of him. When he wants it, when he wants _Draco_. 

Draco goes harder. Faster. There is nothing else but his body sliding over and inside Potter’s body, nothing but the breaths they take and the sounds filling the room. There is nothing but him, and Potter. Nothing but them and this moment, right now.

 

///

 

Potter presses the small, brass key into his palm one Saturday morning as Draco is leaving his flat. Draco always makes sure to leave early when he stays over on a Friday night. Weekends together mean something else. They mean something other than fucking.

“What’s this?” he asks, his hand gone still in the laces of his boot. 

“I’d have thought that was obvious,” Potter says. He still hasn’t put his shirt back on and his hair is a mess. He smiles at Draco, like it’s the easiest thing in the world.

“But—“ Draco’s mind stutters. He feels frozen, his boot still untied, staring down at the tiny bomb in his hand. The silence drags on, heavier with every second. 

“Why?” he says, finally.

Potter turns away, toward the window that looks out over the street in front of the house. He fiddles with the blind, opening and closing the slats. “So you can let yourself in. Any time.”

Draco keeps staring at the key. His mind has gone entirely blank, his mouth empty of words. A minute passes, then two. Later, he won’t remember leaving the flat. Won’t recall opening and closing Potter’s door, or if he spoke. His left boot still untied. 

The key still clutched in his hand.

 

///

 

Pansy and Blaise are already sitting in their usual booth when he arrives. They’ve met every other Thursday evening at The Dragon’s Flagon since they left Hogwarts; his friends are some of the few links he’s kept to who he used to be, and so they know him in a way other people never will.

Tonight, though, he’s seriously reconsidering that notion.

“The only remotely surprising news I’m hearing from you right now is that Potter hadn’t _already_ given you a key, and that you haven’t already done the same, to be quite frank,” Blaise is saying. 

“What do you mean?” Draco’s face feels hot and tingly, his tongue loose. Perhaps he should have gone a little easier on the bourbon. “That’s preposterous. The thing with Potter is just sex. It’s just a casual sex arrangement.“

“You make eyes at him over corpses, Draco. There is nothing casual about that.” Blaise raises his eyebrows and tips his glass in Draco’s direction.

“It’s not— it isn’t _like_ that. Potter and I, we’re not—“

“Do go on, Draco,” says Blaise. “”Tell us more about how you and Potter are _not_ , and so eloquently.”

“Fuck off, Blaise.” 

Blaise spreads his hands out, smirking, as if he’s just been given a gift.

“Draco,” Pansy finally breaks in, “you are in denial.”

“I’m not—“

“ _Denial_ ,” she insists. “You have a Thing. About love. Relationships alarm you.”

“Relationships do not alarm me.” He pushes his tumbler back and forth, one hand to the other. “This is just— you are completely off base, Pansy.”

“Draco, don’t be boring. I am never off base.” 

“It’s Potter. _Potter_ , the man—“

“You’ve been fucking for more than two years,” finishes Blaise, suddenly serious. “You broke your engagement for him.”

“I did not—“

“You are monumentally close to screwing this up, Draco.” Pansy is tapping her pale pink-lacquered nails against the tabletop— tap-tap-tap. “And as you are one of the few people I do not actually hate, I don’t want to see you throw away the best thing that’s happened to you since you _didn’t_ kill Albus Dumbledore. No,” she says sharply when he opens his mouth. “You’re done talking now. Finish your bourbon and then go sleep it off, and when you wake up tomorrow I suggest you start being very honest with yourself.”

Blaise is resting his chin in one hand, looking back and forth between them. “Listen to your mates, Draco,” he adds, and drains the rest of his drink.

Draco scowls, but does the same. With enough alcohol, perhaps even the most stubborn of problems will go away, at least for the night.

 

///

 

Somewhere around the year mark of sleeping together, Potter caught a rare hex during a fight with a wizard he was trying to arrest. It was an ingenious little bit of dark magic, as slippery as it was strong. By the time the Healers at St. Mungo’s figured out what they were dealing with, and how to stop it, the curse had run in increasingly complex lines of damage under Potter’s skin, rupturing blood vessels and tearing through muscle and skin in intersecting lines all over his torso. A blood-red web of wreckage. The Healers repaired all the internal damage, across a tense three days, but the scarring along the outer layer of skin, particularly right across Potter’s chest, remained. 

They’d offered special treatments, Draco learned, after Potter was back in his flat and Draco was bringing take out by every evening, just because he was bored, of course; things had been dull at the Hit Wizard department the last week. They’d offered scar removal, but Potter had waved it off. 

“It’s just some skin,” he told Draco over pad thai. “I’m really not that bothered about looking pretty. I just wanted to get home, instead.”

“Your disinterest in your appearance has always been quite evident, Potter,” Draco had said. He was eating a Massaman curry, his favorite, but for some reason that evening it had tasted like ashes in his mouth. “Anyone who has witnessed your personal grooming habits over any amount of time can attest to that.”

Potter had just smiled at him, like he knew something about the joke that Draco didn’t. It was annoying, really, the way Potter seemed to think he knew more about Draco than he had any right or reason to. The way he took things Draco said without the venom intended, sometimes. 

“It’s a good thing you’re here,” Potter said after a couple more mouthfuls. “I can’t reach around my back to put the ointment on there. I could use your dexterous fingers.”

Potter smirked, and Draco said, smiling a little, “Dexterous, Potter? That’s a ten-sickle word. Didn’t know you had it in you.”

“You’d be surprised, Malfoy. What I’ve got in me.”

“Stop,” Draco said. “Please stop trying to make innuendo. And turn over.”

Potter had raised his eyebrows and laughed, the little chortle he did when he was really delighted by something, but put down his styrofoam container and turned over on the sofa. Draco stood over him, and their fingers brushed against each other as he took the small jar Potter handed back to him. It smelled like lavender and cloves and chamomile tea. It felt different, too, touching Potter like this; apart from sex and with no immediate intention to have it. With each pass of his fingertip over the red, angry lines in Potter’s skin something grew inside him— some mounting discomfort, a pressure rising up from his chest toward his mouth.

He cleared his throat in the silence. “Don’t get too used to this, Potter,” he’d said. His voice sounded strange to his ears. “I might not always be around to get your back.”

Potter turned his head slightly on the throw pillow, but said nothing.

 

///

 

The morning after his night out with Pansy and Blaise, Draco lies in bed for a long time. The sun paints his wall from blue to gray, white to yellow-gold as the sun rises higher and higher into the morning sky, and still he lies there, in his soft white sheets, staring at the ceiling. 

He thinks about love. About the things people will do for the ones they love. The lines they’ll cross and the messes they’ll make.

 

///

 

It’s funny, the way time slows down in a duel. How your heartbeat gets so loud in your ears, and the breath coming in and out of your lungs feels more deliberate. More finite.

Naples was supposed to be a dead end. They’d only sent him to tick the box, to say they’d checked the rumor out. But there was Macnair, in an ill-fitting khaki suit, eyes locked with his. There was the particular, weird light in Macnair’s eyes that fugitives sometimes got when they had already decided that they were not returning home, no matter what. 

There was a bad man, and the knowledge of that empty bed in St. Mungo’s reserved with his name on it, and there was a sudden, sinking regret that he might never see Harry Potter again. Never have the chance to fill that last, fumbling silence.

Then Macnair went for his wand, and Draco’s was already pulled, and it was almost simple to send that curse through the air. Hit Wizards were sent with a single purpose, after all, and Draco was very good at his job. 

After, time catches up. The people around him react, sound goes back to normal. He’s left with the corpse he made and the blinding, obvious realization of something he’d half-known all along. The Muggle cops come first, before he can contain the scene himself, and then the Italian Aurors take over, and all the while Draco is thinking about that key and how it had felt pressed into his palm.

 

///

 

He knows as soon as Potter enters the square, metallic room outside the holding cell. If he hadn’t recognized him by height and stature, by the dark, untidy hair and the familiar set of his shoulders when he’s particularly tense, Draco would still have known him immediately by the way he held his head when he walked into his peripheral vision. High and straight on his neck, with the chin tilted up like a satellite scanning the area for the source of disturbance. His body turns toward Draco, but he keeps his gaze away, on the three other people in the room with them: one Auror, a representative for the Italian ambassador, and a lawyer. 

The Auror squints down at the paperwork in his hand, then at the printed badge Potter extends to him. “You’re the British DMLE representative, then.”

“Auror Potter.” The voice, memorized down to its lowest chord, remembered precisely up to the highest, and all the notes in between. Harry’s voice.

“Auror Moretti,” the man says, warmer, and Draco rolls his eyes. “We were told to expect you.”

“I’m sure you were.” Potter turns to him finally, and Draco sees his jaw clench when he takes in the bruising around his left eye and the faint abrasions on his cheekbone. His eyes flash and his mouth turns down on one side as they lock eyes, then he glances away again. If they were alone, Potter would tell him he probably deserved that.

If they were alone, Draco would agree.

“Was there a reason you roughed up one of my Hit Wizards?”

“Mr. Potter,” begins the Ambassador’s man, but the lawyer shakes her head at him. 

“Never mind,” says Potter. “I’ll be taking him back with me now, of course. Where’s Macnair’s body? I need that, too.”

“I’m afraid that might be a problem, Auror Potter,” says Moretti, a little uncomfortably. “I don’t have clearance to release the body right now, and my department will want to investigate his identity and how he came to be in Naples.”

“My department will want to verify this kill immediately,” says Potter. “You realize this man is at the top of our Wanted list? A Death Eater we’ve been tracking for seven years, since Voldemort’s death?”

The Italians all flinch at the name, and Draco smiles, slow and toothy like a shark. 

“We understand, Mr. Potter,” begins the lawyer, “but—“

“Call your boss,” Potter cuts in. “Now, please. You’ve no idea how much paperwork I have waiting for me, and I really haven’t got time to go through all this with you. Let’s just make this easier for everyone, yeah?”

Potter smiles, and the Italians begin to relax and smile back, because he is charming and because he is Harry Potter, and Draco can’t think of anyone he’d rather see. Here, now. Anywhere, anytime. Forever.

 

///

 

Potter is waiting by the elevators when Draco finally leaves his office. They ride down to the Atrium, and Draco steps into the same Floo. They come out in a telephone booth in Potter’s neighborhood. The walk is silent for the two blocks to Potter’s house, and neither of them speaks while Potter turns his key in the lock. As soon as the door closes behind him, Potter turns and heads to the kitchen, ripping his Auror robes off on the way. Draco follows, slow. The gap between the feeling and its expression feels looming and large, and always there’s that line inside his head. Right or wrong? Good man or bad man or always in between?

Potter’s put the kettle on. Draco likes to mock him for it, usually— _You’re such a middle-aged housewife, Potter_ — but tonight it’s as comforting as it is amusing. He wonders if other people felt like that, when the thing they’d always said they never wanted became what they wanted most.

“We’re always meeting over corpses,” is what comes out of Draco’s mouth.

It takes a long moment for Potter to turn around and look at him. There’s a sinking feeling inside his chest, at the thought of Potter _not_ watching him back, the way they’ve always done. Anyone can be pushed too far, Draco knows. Even Potter, with his crooked smiles and easy affection.

“It’s been over a week, Draco.” Potter looks tired. He looks rumpled with his Auror robes off, smaller and more worn— more human. More Harry. “No word. Not even an Owl. And you expect to just walk in and pick up right where we left off? I’m not sure I can do that anymore, Draco. I’m not sure I can ignore how lopsided this is between us, when it’s been two years.”

“It’s not—“ Draco swallows, and straightens the buttons down the front of his own uniform. If he took it off, would he be more like Draco, or less? 

“It’s not lopsided. It _isn’t_ , Potter, and I— Look, I know I screwed up the past week. But the thing is, today I was just doing a walkthrough of a dive bar in Naples. It was supposed to be the pointless, easy run of the day. And then, suddenly, I thought that maybe the corpse we were going to meet over next would be mine, and I—“ Merlin, he was bad at this. “And I didn’t want to be a corpse before I was the guy who had your key in his pocket. Who smears ointment on your back scars, every time.”

The kettle is starting to hum, like it does just before it boils and whistles, but Potter isn’t looking at it. He doesn’t even seem to notice. He’s watching Draco.

“I’m sorry, Harry,” says Draco, and he walks over to the stove to turn off the burner. He pulls the kettle off and to the side, and when he turns back again Potter is right there. Right behind, right in reach. He leans into him. Harry smells like lemon soap and milky tea. He smells like home.

Potter puts a hand on the back of his neck, and Draco presses his lips into the skin below his ear. He raises his head, and then he kisses him. He kisses Harry, and he puts his hands on either side of his face. It’s slow at first, and then it’s hard and almost frantic. Potter’s hands are in his hair, and he pulls it, rough. Draco chokes on the sweet, sharp hurt. 

He pulls back, lets his head fall against the cabinets behind him with a dull thump, and suddenly Potter’s palm is pressing against the zipper of his trousers. His cock is hard and Potter’s touch is hard and something short-circuits in his brain. It wasn’t a lie, precisely, when he told Pansy that relationships didn’t alarm him. More a half-truth. Bodies and touching don’t alarm him, but the other stuff, the non-physical; well, he’s seen enough during the war and after, seen that humans are messy creatures when they blur their borders with other humans. Illogical, unpredictable. But then Harry Potter has always defied logic, hasn’t he? No touching needed.

But right now there is touching, so much touching. With fingers curled like claws and lungs burning. Like he’s running for his life, like he’s drowning. He pushes his fingers into the gaps between the buttons of Potter’s shirt and tugs until Potter’s chest is bare to him. Potter’s belly, rising and falling in choppy waves. Potter’s shoulders, the puckered pink of the worst of the scarring running down and across his chest. He should have known then, when Potter got those scars. That night over Thai takeout in Potter’s flat, and that terrible, consuming fear as he touched the ruined skin that marked Potter’s vulnerability as plain as day. He _would_ have known then, if he’d been able to bear it: that he was in love with Potter. It had _hurt_ , though, and he’d been half-heartedly running away ever since. 

“Touch me,” he chokes out, his vision swimming and his mouth aching for Potter.

“I am touching you,” Potter murmurs, the words catching on the side of his neck where Potter’s lips are pressing, hot and damp. His hands are trailing down Draco’s sides, landing on the buckle of his belt. 

“Touch me more,” he whispers, as the metal clinks and the zipper slides open. _Let me in. The kingdom, the kingdom, your kingdom._

 

///

 

Saturday morning, and Potter is still sleeping. He pulls on his boots and grabs his wallet off the table. 

The street is nearly empty until he gets close to the shops near the park, where people are coming out from the coffee shop with their lattes and paper bags filled with pastries. He heads for the little grocer first, and looks over their tea selection. There’s a nice Assam blend, so he puts it in the little basket he picked up by the door, along with milk and a jar of honey. 

The man behind the counter smiles at him, so he smiles back, and tips the change into his back pocket. Next door, he orders a croissant and a blueberry scone. There are more people out now, and he watches them talking and laughing, starting their weekend. The sun peeks higher between the buildings and casts shadows onto the pavement.

On the stoop, he pulls a small brass key from his pocket, and he unlocks the door.

Potter is standing in the doorway of the kitchen, bare chested, his flannel pajama pants hanging low on his hips. His hair is a mess, and there are dark pink patches along his collarbone and neck where Draco’s mouth had been last night. 

“You’re back,” says Potter. He’s blinking, slow. Still throwing off sleep. 

“I’m back,” says Draco. He sets the bags down on the table and takes off his coat. He lays the key beside it. “I let myself in.”

Potter catches him around the waist as he heads for the kettle, and slides sleepy lips against his. Draco smiles into the kiss. 

“Later, Potter,” he says when Potter pulls back. “Put the kettle on. I’ve been down to the shops. Your tea is shit, by the way.” 

Potter smiles, and for a moment Draco forgets to inhale. He is filled in with all the things he wants with Potter, he is messy and distinctly entangled. 

He is happy.

When the tea is ready he breathes it in, malt and heat and earth. Potter tips a bit of cream in from the carton and a splash misses his mug and ends up on the counter. Draco sweeps it up with his thumb, then brings it up to his mouth, licking the sweet drops from the pad of skin there. He looks back at Potter and finds him watching, eyes tracking between Draco’s lips and the fingers he slowly lowers. He thinks about how long he’s been watching Potter— how long Potter has been watching him back— and then Harry is leaning into him, hands settling warm and gentle on his waist, his nose nudging into Draco’s collarbone and then rising. Harry’s lips brushing against his. It always surprises him, just for a moment, even now: how they slide together.

How their jagged edges align. How the fit is ever-turning, unlocking deeper and deeper into each other.

**Author's Note:**

> * I obviously owe Monty Python for the inappropriate corpse jokes. It's an honor to do an homage to the dead parrot skit.
> 
>  
> 
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> 
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